Water Leaks: Your Pool Might Be The Culprit

Author: Christina Fink

Date: September 4, 2022

Are your water bills high? Are you blaming the heat and feeling guilty for watering too many days and too long at each station merely to keep landscaping alive? Do you suspect a broken pipe somewhere on your property? Is your timer set to go off at night when you are asleep and therefore you do not see or hear a landscaping pipe with a hole geyser gushing in your yard?

Think again. It could be a leak in your pool, which was exactly our situation. During Covid we did a pool remodel, during which all water lines were pressure checked, jets flushed, drains repaired, etc. We added an auto-refill, so the water level always appeared to be normal. We never saw any signs of water leakage anywhere on our property. We had upgraded from chlorine to a salt water pool, and as it turns out, the pool service noted that the salt to water ratio was dropping. And yes, this was the indicator of a leak in our new pool and somewhere under our new one year old deck.

The solution came by way of two leak detection professionals evaluating the problem, independent of each other. They each concluded the same location under the new deck was the source of the problem. This meant saw cutting into our brand new deck to reach and repair the broken pipe.

I called Santa Fe Irrigation just to share our story. Although they have a "portal" for customers to monitor their water use, I added that a high reading would only have led me to check my irrigation. I never would have thought that a new pool was the problem.